“And am I any better than the rest?  Do I know what I’m after—­what I’m about?”

He left them soon, for he felt very tired.  He went to his daughter to say good-night.  And in her room the talk he had heard became to him suddenly remote, that restless world of small account.  For in Edith, in the one brief hour since her father had seen her last, there had come a great transformation, into her face an eager light.  She was slipping down into a weird small world which for a brief but fearful season was to be utterly her own, with agony and bloody sweat, and joy and a deep mystery.  Clumsily he took her hand.  It was moist and he felt it clutch his own.  He heard her breathing rapidly.

“Good-night,” he said in a husky tone.  “I’ll be so glad, my dear, so glad.”

For answer she gave him a hurried smile, a glance from her bright restless eyes.  Then he went heavily from the room.

* * * * *

At home he found Deborah sitting alone, with a pile of school papers in her lap.  As he entered she slowly turned her head.

“How is Edith?” she asked him.  Roger told of his visit uptown, and spoke of Edith’s anxiety over getting the children up to the farm.

“I’ll take them myself,” said Deborah.

“But how can you get away from school?”

“Oh, I think I can manage it.  We’ll leave on Friday morning and I can be back by Sunday night.  I’ll love it,” Deborah answered.

“It’ll be a great relief to her,” said Roger, lighting a cigar.  Deborah resumed her work, and there was silence for a time.

“I let George sit up with me till an hour after his bedtime,” she told her father presently.  “We started talking about white rats—­you see it’s still white rats with George—­and that started us wondering about God.  George wonders if God really knows about rats.  ’Has he ever stuck his face right down and had a good close look at one?  Has God ever watched a rat stand up and brush his whiskers with both paws?  Has he ever really laughed at rats?  And that’s another thing, Aunt Deborah—­does God ever laugh at all?  Does he know how to take a joke?  If he don’t, we might as well quit right now!’”

Roger laughed with relish, and his daughter smiled at him: 

“Then the talk turned from rats and God to a big dam out in the Rockies.  George has been reading about it, he’s thinking of being an engineer.  And there was so much he wanted to know that he was soon upon the verge of discovering my ignorance—­when all of a sudden a dreamy look, oh, a very dreamy look, came into his eyes—­and he asked me this.”  And over her bright expressive face came a scowl of boyish intensity:  “Suppose I was an engineer—­and I was working on a dam, or may be a bridge, in the Rockies.  And say it was pretty far down south—­say around the Grand Canyon.  I should think they’d need a dam down there, or anyhow a bridge,’ said George.